Jumping

Jump Training

Training a horse in Jumping is a lot like training it in Racing. You have to buy at least one jumping obstacle, located in the Pets sort (and horses subsort) of Buy Mode. Each jumping obstacle has its own level of difficulty, increasing with the price of the obstacle itself. The tougher the obstacle, the less of a chance the horse can jump it, but the greater the Jumping skill gain from doing so.

Jumping seems to be partly modified from Racing, and is definitely modified by the rider’s Riding skill. If your horse’s Racing and the rider’s Riding skills are around Level 8, you can usually convince the horse to jump any obstacle; though it may fail several times, it will at least try the jump rather than backing off.

You can link multiple jumping obstacles together to make a jumping course. When you do so, the horse will try them all in order, then circle back around. Note that you’ll need a lot of room to make a course longer than one or two obstacles, but you don’t really need more than that. Once a horse masters a given obstacle and never fails, sell it and buy the next expensive obstacle. Keep this up, and you’ll be able to train the horse up to Jumping level 10 with minimal effort.

If you’re training multiple horses, you’ll probably just want to keep a couple mid- or high-level jumping obstacles around rather than ever using the low ones. After all, if you’re usually training multiple horses, that tends to mean you’ve got a human with high Riding skill. That means you could use that jockey to convince the horse to try tougher obstacles and not need to even bother with the beginner-level obstacles.

Horses gain their Racing skill while running a jumping course, but much slower than running the racing pylons. Even though it takes longer to gain Jumping to 10, it’s most efficient to do so before switching to pure Racing training. However, if you’re just starting out, you may want to consider going pure Racing so you can gain cash as quickly as possible.

Like with Racing, you can start participating in competitions almost immediately to earn some cash for your training efforts. Check the competitions section for more details.